Month: August 2009

Would you buy a shirt for your baby that had nipple tassels on it? One company is hoping you will.

ParentDish interviewed the designer behind TwistedTwee, which is selling t-shirts for babies and preschoolers that include nipple tassels, among other items.

The designer, Suzi Warren, told ParentDish via email that “The Nipple Tassel t-shirt was designed as a response to my own distaste at seeing mini versions of sexy clothes on young children. Five-year-olds wearing slashed mini skirts and boob tubes, little thumb-sucking Britneys.” I guess that’s like wearing blackface to protest racism? Mostly Warren is doing it to make money. At least I hope that’s why. If she honestly believes that this is an effective form of protest, I’d hate to think what she’d do with an issue like health care reform.

Personally, I think nipple tassels are tacky for anyone. If it’s a stripper, I mean, whatever. She’s a stripper. But otherwise it seems like a poor fashion choice.

On a kid? A little kid? Ew.

But hey, that’s not all “TwistedTee” has to offer:

Mostly the problem is the shirt with the nipple tassels. Oh, and the infant t-shirts that say “I’ve Done F*** All Today.” And “B is for Beer.”

And when the tassel-wearing tyke grows to her pre-teen years, she just might decide to put those tassels to good use. Ladies and gents, behold the pole-dancing doll:

It rotates. It has blinking lights, a disco ball, and a pole. And it’s probably one of the wrongest toys you can give to any girl. Because, unlike the USB Pole Dancer, this one is actually for kids.

It’s the perfect gift, right? Well – the perfect gift for the adults in this world who still have not grown-up to give to their kids, anyway.

NEW YORK — The United Nations is recommending that children as young as five receive mandatory sexual education that would teach even pre-kindergarteners about masturbation and topics like gender violence.

The U.N.’s Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a 98-page report in June offering a universal lesson plan for kids ranging in age from 5-18, an
“informed approach to effective sex, relationships” and HIV education that they say is essential for “all young people.”

The U.N. insists the program is “age appropriate,” but critics say it’s exposing kids to sex far too early, and offers up abstract ideas — like “transphobia” — they might not even understand.

[…]

The UNESCO report, called “International Guidelines for Sexuality Education,” separates children into four age groups: 5-to-8-year-olds, 9-to-12-year-olds, 12-to-15-year-olds and 15-to-18-year-olds.

Under the U.N.’s voluntary sex-ed regime, kids just 5-8 years old will be told that “touching and rubbing one’s genitals is called masturbation” and that private parts “can feel pleasurable when touched by oneself.”

By the time they’re 9 years old, they’ll learn about “positive and negative effects of ‘aphrodisiacs,” and wrestle with the ideas of “homophobia, transphobia and abuse of power.”

I wish I could say that I was shocked by that report on the UN, but I’m not – because it’s the very same thing advocated by SIECUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States) – an organization which boasts they they “provide countless resources to help educators, advocates, and parents secure supportive public policies, provide high quality education, and help our youth become sexually healthy” – in their “Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education (pages 51-52).”

And SIECUS aren’t the only “sex ed” organization out there that promotes the sexualization of our children at very young ages. I’ve written about others here.

While I’m deeply concerned about what the UN is pushing for, I’m even more concerned about what’s being taught on the sex ed front here in America. If you have a child who is enrolled in the public school system, it goes without saying that you should keep a close eye on what they’re studying and learning – especially as it relates to sex education. It’s unfortunate, but these days you simply can’t just trust that a school system will have the best interests of your child at heart. Stay alert, stay informed, and most importantly, stay in tune with your child’s course load. Sometimes the only thing standing between them and certain “progressive” educators who think they know best how to “prepare” your child for the “real world” is you.

The Boston Globe reports today that the MA Gov. Deval Patrick (D) is pressing hard – “for Teddy!” – to get the state legislature to undo a law they put into place on Senate vacancies back in 2004 when the Governor was a Republican:

Governor Deval Patrick continued today to press for a change to state law to allow him to appoint an interim replacement for Senator Edward M. Kennedy as he announced that a special election for the seat will be held on Jan. 19.

At a press conference carried live nationally on CSPAN, Patrick told reporters that he has discussed the potential change in law with state legislative leaders “numerous times over the last several days” and they are “moving as fast as they can.” A legislative committee announced earlier today that it will hold a hearing next week on a bill that would allow Patrick to appoint a temporary replacement, a signal that Beacon Hill is moving to accommodate Kennedy’s request that Massachusetts maintain two voices in the Senate.

“I think they are trying to work their way through it and they are talking to their members and listening to their members. I don’t think by any means it is a certainty that it will happen, at least in my conversations with them,” Patrick said, referring to legislative leaders. “I think that they are trying to find a path from here to there to honor, as I say, the very reasonable request of Senator Kennedy.”

State statute calls for an election to be held on a Tuesday between 145 and 160 days after a vacancy occurs, which gave Patrick just two potential dates, Jan. 19 or Jan. 26. The governor said today that he did his best to select a date that would lessen the impact on the holidays between the primary and general election.

“It seemed to me that would be by having the earlier primary,” Patrick said.

[…]

The chairmen of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Election Laws announced earlier today they have moved the hearing date from early October to Sept. 9 for a bill that would allow Patrick to appoint an interim senator. The House and Senate, which are in summer recess, do not return in full formal session until next week. The bill could come to the floor of both the House and Senate within days after the hearing.

”One of the senator’s last public acts was a request that the Legislature explore ways to amend state law so the Commonwealth will not lose a voice in the United States Senate pending the filling of the seat with a special election,” said state Senator Thomas P. Kennedy, a Brockton Democrat, the Senate chairman of the election laws committee. (He is not related to Edward Kennedy.)

The move to change the date of the hearing comes as lawmakers continue to wrestle with the controversial issue of allowing Patrick to make the temporary appointment. Democrats, including US Senate majority leader Harry Reid, argue that Massachusetts should be fully represented with two votes in the Senate when such issues as health care reform and climate change come up this fall.

Ummm … I have a better idea. Why not just wait until after the “special election” to have a vote on these “important bills”? That way, instead of shoving cap and trade and ObamaCare down the throats of the American people, there would be real opportunity there for – gasp! – debate, or maybe even a scrapping of these bills in order to start fresh with a clean slate.

Oh, that’s right. I almost forgot who I was talking about here: Democrats, who have demonstrated time and time again that their stated desires – announced prior to the 2006 elections – to “act in the spirit of bipartisanship” and to “have an open and honest dialogue with the American people, were nothing more than a crock of you-know-what.

So with that in mind, let’s place bets on 1) how long it will take before the MA legislature gives the Governor’s house its power back and 2) who he’ll choose.

BTW, contra to earlier reports swirling in the MA media, Ted Kennedy’s wife Vicki is not interested in filling the seat. Gov. Patrick stated today that he wasn’t either, because he’s running for reelection next year, which could be problematic for him if his ratings continue to tank.

Related: MA blogger and Boston Herald editor Jules Crittenden slams liberal icon Glenn Greenwald’s Salon piece on “royalty” in the United States because he didn’t mention one thing about the “Camelot Kennedys,” in spite of all the coverage Senator Kennedy’s death and funeral received last week. Must-read!

TNR has a revealing – and highly nauseating – piece on the “courtship” of David Brooks by Barack Obama. The story pretty much confirms what I and many others have been saying about David Brooks for a while now in that he’s allowed himself to be shamelessly used and abused by Beltway Democrats for at least the last several years, and none of them have used him more to their advantage than Barack Obama, David Axelrod (whose relationship with Brooks goes back decades) and others in The One’s administration. Here’s a snippet:

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with getting to know the people you’re writing about. But when columnists stop being cynics of the opposition and instead write pieces that sound like official talking points, they turn into little more than their shills, which is exactly what’s happened to David Brooks, which probably explains why about the only people who read Brooks’ columns anymore are GOP Beltway elite types and senior officials in the Obama adminstration. The former to find out how to be more like Democrats, and the later to make sure he’s staying on point.

After an August recess marked by raucous town halls, troubling polling data and widespread anecdotal evidence of a volatile electorate, the small universe of political analysts who closely follow House races is predicting moderate to heavy Democratic losses in 2010.

Some of the most prominent and respected handicappers can now envision an election in which Democrats suffer double-digit losses in the House — not enough to provide the 40 seats necessary to return the GOP to power but enough to put them within striking distance.

Top political analyst Charlie Cook, in a special August 20 update to subscribers, wrote that “the situation this summer has slipped completely out of control for President Obama and congressional Democrats.”

“Many veteran congressional election watchers, including Democratic ones, report an eerie sense of déjà vu, with a consensus forming that the chances of Democratic losses going higher than 20 seats is just as good as the chances of Democratic losses going lower than 20 seats,” he wrote.

At the mid-August Netroots Nation convention, Nate Silver, a Democratic analyst whose uncannily accurate, stat-driven predictions have made his website FiveThirtyEight.com a must read among political junkies, predicted that Republicans will win between 20 and 50 seats next year. He further alarmed an audience of progressive activists by arguing that the GOP has between a 25 and 33 percent chance of winning back control of the House.

“A lot of Democratic freshmen and sophomores will be running in a much tougher environment than in 2006 and 2008 and some will adapt to it, but a lot of others will inevitably freak out and end up losing,” Silver told POLITICO. “Complacency is another factor: We have volunteers who worked really hard in 2006 and in 2008 for Obama but it’s less compelling [for them] to preserve the majority.”

Read the whole thing for more compelling information which suggests that next year could be the year of the beginning of the GOP comeback … provided, of course, that the party stick to its guns in getting back to its core principles, and nailing Obama and his Democrats in the House and Senate on the monstrous healthcare bill, cap and trade, and other policies that will hurt “the little guy” far more than it will help him.

If the party could turn this around next year, it’d be pretty amazing, especially considering that for all intents and purposes right now, it is leaderless.

Read more via Rick Moran, who has a good analysis on various scenarios that could work for the GOP over the next few election cycles, depending on certain factors and how things trend.